


Save the Cheerleader, Save the World

by greenglowsgold



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, post-s2, reaction!fic, s2 spoilers, story is more serious than the title implies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 04:00:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9417569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenglowsgold/pseuds/greenglowsgold
Summary: There are things you can lose, and things you can't. There are people you need, and there are always going to be ways to get them back.





	

Keith waits until he can’t stand not hitting something, then goes to the training deck. It takes hours to tire himself out, and he still hates that he can’t get to a higher level on the program. He should be better than this.

But he’s panting and shaking and he knows he won’t be able to focus if he goes back to the control room and watches Allura and Coran try to manually scan the entirety of an infinite universe for just one person, so he turns left instead, toward the hangers. He remembers placing a hand on the Black Lion’s chrome muzzle, asking for help and being let inside so they could save Shiro, and wonders if that’s the kind of thing that could work twice. He has to be able to do _something_. He knows he’s better than this.

He walks into the Black Lions hanger and the light is on, and for a split second his heart leaps, but it’s not Shiro. It’s Pidge, hunkered down against the lion’s side and bent over a keyboard. There are so many wires around her it almost looks like she’s trying to plug herself in.

She looks up when he calls her name, but only for a second. “Anything?” she asks, still typing so fast her fingers blur.

“No.”

And that’s it. They could say more, but neither of them are big talkers (nervous rambling aside), and nothing else is that important, anyway. Pidge doesn’t ask what Keith is doing when he steps inside and moves to face the Black Lion, standing directly before its head. It’s still turned sideways, slumped on the floor right where they dropped it. It hasn’t moved.

Keith takes a breath — _patience yields focus_ , he reminds himself — and puts his hand on the lion’s nose, cold from disuse. _Please. Please help me find him. I know you can do it, if he’s still out there somewhere, you can track him down. Please, we need him._

“Come _on_ ,” he growls, when the Black Lion just lies there and doesn’t respond. “I know you want him back, too.”

Nothing.

“Fuck.”

“Well, now she’s definitely not going to help you.”

Keith looks down. Pidge’s eyes are still on the screen, but she’s clearly been paying attention. “I don’t think it’s even listening.” He raps his knuckles twice against the lion’s nose, and sighs.

“They’re always listening,” Pidge says. “There’s something in these lions that’s too… alive to be just a program. They can’t be shut down completely. We just need to tap into that.”

Keith moves around the lion’s head for a closer look at Pidge. There are dark circles under her eyes, darker than usual, and her fingers are twitching a little bit whenever they aren’t on the keyboard. “Have you slept yet?”

Pidge snorts. “Have you?”

“It’s been three days, Pidge,” he replies, not bothering to answer her question (the answer is obvious).

“And that’s too long.” She shakes her head. “Last time we got separated, I had a communication disc up in a few hours, and even that was almost too late. Three _days_ , Keith.”

“I know.” Keith steps carefully over the tangle of wires on the floor, then presses his back to the lion and slides down until he’s seated just beside Pidge. “Can I help?”

He expects to be told no, of course he can’t, because there are a thousand numbers and symbols flying across three different screens at once and he has absolutely no idea what’s going on, but instead Pidge perks up. She sits up straight and her back cracks loud enough to make Keith wince and wonder how long it’s been since she last moved, and she points to the left-most screen. “Watch this screen for me. It’s running through the programs for matches but most of them end up being insignificant and I keep having to stop and sort them out.”

It still doesn’t make any sense to Keith, but the instructions are simple enough once Pidge explains the process, so he settles in next to her and watches numbers flash across the screen. Every so often it blinks green at him and he has to open up the match and assign it into one list or another, and it’s nearly as mindless as the search going on upstairs in the main control room that he’d so desperately wanted to avoid, but something about being here settles him. Pressed against Pidge’s side and the stomach of the Black Lion, surrounded by a nest of wires, it’s quiet except for Pidge’s typing.

He’s always liked the quiet.

Still, it’s him who ends up breaking it. “Have you figured out why the lion is offline?” It bothers him more than he’d like to admit, to see the Black Lion limp on the floor. It reminds him of that barren planet, when he’d nearly been too late.

“I already told you, it’s not offline. Not completely. It’s like sleep, but deeper.”

“Yeah, but it’s not doing anything,” Keith says, frowning up at the large, motionless head.

“I… think it is.”

“Huh?”

Pidge is looking up from her computer again, pointing to a column of numbers on the far right of her layout. “I think it's looking for him. It came for him once, so did mine, when we were on our own. And your found you from _star systems_ away. If it’s not being active, I think that’s because it’s saving its energy for something more important.”

And that _is_ the most important thing; Keith can’t even argue. Except.

“What if we need it? For something else? What if…” He falters.

“What if the Galra come back?” Pidge finishes for him.

Keith shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not like we’d be able to form Voltron, anyway.” He turns back to his screen, and thinks for a moment that would be the end of it.

“I heard him,” Pidge says quietly. “When you two were stranded together. We got a comm link up right before the wormhole opened.”

Keith sinks down, trying to focus on the numbers, though they’re flying by too fast for him to read.

“No one would mind, you know. If you took over. Just for a while, I mean, until…”

“What good would that do?” Keith snaps, punching a command into the screen with excess force. “Even if the Black Lion would let me in, than Red would be missing a pilot. We’d still be short.”

“So let Allura pilot Black. You can still lead us as the red paladin, just—”

“I _can’t_.” Keith covers his eyes with a hand, settling himself into darkness. He sucks in a breath and tries to center himself ( _patience yields focus, remember what he told you, patience…_ ), but his heartbeat is faster than he remembers. “I know I’m supposed to focus up and stay in control and help everybody _else_ get through this, but I just can’t. I can’t—” He can’t finish the sentence, something like a sob breaking through. “I can’t do this without him.”

He can’t, but he has to, he knows that. Just because Zarkon is gone doesn’t mean the entire empire will fall apart just like that. There are always other factions, other people ready to take power; history class has taught him that much. They need to be ready, but he just feels like he’s going to fall apart, even more than during the trials of the Blade of Marmora, because then, at least, he knew Shiro was waiting for him on the other side.

“You know what? Fuck it.” There’s a loud _snap_ that makes him look up to find that Pidge has actually _closed her computer_ and is staring back at him with entirely too much fire in her eyes for someone who’s been awake for 72 hours. He thinks he’s about to be scolded, told to suck it up and do what’s best for the team and for the universe but: “ You’re right.”

“...What?”

“You’re right,” Pidge repeats. Her gaze is steady, her hands more still than they’ve been this whole time. “We _can’t_ do this without Shiro, and screw him for trying to make us. He didn’t give us that whole ‘fill in the blanks and move on’ speech when Allura was the one in trouble, he turned us around to go _get_ her. It’s not up to him to tell us not to do the same thing now.”

Keith shakes his head, scrubbing roughly across his face to wipe away a rouge tear. “Of course we should go get him,” he grumbles, because that was never in doubt. “But not— Life shouldn’t stop just because he’s missing. We need to be okay without him in the meantime.”

“Why,” says Pidge, and it’s not a question. “I don’t care about what we’re _supposed_ to do; this is how it is. You’re right, we need him. And if he needs some time to recover after we get him back, or if he decides he can’t be leader for a while, then fine, we’ll deal with it then. With Shiro.”

Keith should argue. He should, he’s supposed to be the new leader, to keep everybody moving forward, but she’s saying everything he wants to hear. “I need to plan for the worst.”

“I don’t,” Pidge says. “I plan for the best. That’s how I make it happen.”

Keith’s rigid face cracks into a tiny smile. “You do. You always make the best things happen.”

And that, of all things, after three days without sleep and horrible conversations and intense outbursts, that’s the thing that makes Pidge cry. Keith’s not really a physical comfort kind of person, but he sort of leans forward at the first sign of tears, and Pidge must do the same, and they were already so close that they end up tangled together somehow, and Keith’s cheeks are wet again.

“You sound just like him.” Pidge’s shaky voice echoes out from somewhere near Keith’s armpit. “You’d make a good leader.”

“Maybe,” Keith acknowledges. “But we don’t really need one.”

Pidge chuckles. “No, we don’t.”

The Black Lion purrs her agreement.

It takes them a moment to notice, but then Keith is springing back and Pidge is shouting. “She’s awake! You’re awake!”

Pidge scrambles to clear away the wires as the Black Lion shifts, slowly at first but then confidently moving to sit up straight, a hundred feet of power. Her eyes are glowing. “You found him,” Keith whispers, and Pidge stills beside him just in time to hear a reassuring rumble from the lion.

“Everybody get down to the hanger, _now_ ,” Pidge orders over the comm.

Keith runs his hand down the slope of Black’s leg, over and over. He doesn’t take his eyes off her when Pidge joins him, pressed against his side like before. “Thank you.”


End file.
